About

OurMedia is a project of the Digital Narrative Alliance (DNA), an open professional collaboration to explore the future of story and narrative technologies, including video, immersive experience, including augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR), artificially intelligent characters and myriad emerging tools for storytelling.

Here at OurMedia, we will collect articles and experiences created by creatives from around the world. We’ll also be hosting video archives of DNA encounters, such as the November 10, 2016 Narrative Summit at Cogswell College in Santa Clara, California. OurMedia will also become the home of our learning resources and news updates that enable storytellers’ leap from curiousity to active production using new narrative tools.

In 2017, the DNA will be delivering several one-day encounters around specific issues in storytelling, as well as conference tracks for organizations seeking to understand narrative’s use in society and organizations. The group is developing books, reports, and training material to help storytellers in person and remotely anywhere in the world.

Our Second Founding

OurMedia is the brainchild of Marc Canter and J.D. Lasica, who founded the site more than a decade ago. They fostered a community of thousands who were the first explorers of content and conversation on the Internet. OurMedia was founded in 2004, before Facebook had leapt from Harvard to the mainstream, and a year before the launch of YouTube. They partnered with the Internet Archive and its founder, Brewster Kahle, who hosted content on OurMedia for all to share. They had the genius to invite people to build libraries of their stories.

This took so many colorful paths in the beginning and as new social and video giants started to emerge they cast a shadow on these efforts to support the community. Marc moved on, J.D. held the site together, eventually with the help of Outhink, a business foundry and supported by Markus Sandy along with others in the community that kept it moving along. J.D. also had support from many of the pioneers creating video stories, images and sounds that shared between them in their communities. OurMedia was over 150,000 members strong.

We started learning how to shape stories on the Internet here a decade ago. J.D. Lasica moved on and OurMedia languished. In 2017, we’re bringing it back. The new team is exploring how to provide hosting of stories, as it once did, as well as introducing new storytelling events, news, and learning programs.

Narrative is different from before digital technology, but it’s also the same. Let’s join together and explore this new world in Ourmedia, rekindling the spirit of OurMedia, and sharing our voice without constraint with intent to advance our more complete story of human life.

Please join us, again, to help get the Digital Story Association to its next level. To find out how you can participate, please send email to narrative@ourmedia.org.